Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 23, 2010 @04:54PM
from the get-out-your-thesaurus dept.

Nite_Hawk writes "Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of directors' and senior executives' names followed by 'sucks' and 'blows.'"

Considering their motive is indirect censorship and their target market that they wish would not see the offending material is amongst the veritable hordes of Facebook/Twitter/MySpace zombies out there this is incredibly stupid.

URL shortener exist for a reason. It makes posting to Facebook and Twitter that much easier. Not to mention, it would be pretty hard for BoFA to prevent people from forming Facebook groups.

Domain names are just one of the ways we use to communicate locations, and find them, on the Internet now.

Considering their motive is indirect censorship and their target market that they wish would not see the offending material is amongst the veritable hordes of Facebook/Twitter/MySpace zombies out there this is incredibly stupid.

URL shortener exist for a reason. It makes posting to Facebook and Twitter that much easier. Not to mention, it would be pretty hard for BoFA to prevent people from forming Facebook groups.

Domain names are just one of the ways we use to communicate locations, and find them, on the Internet now.

Foolish and a waste of money.

Foolish and a waste of money to most people. However to a multi-billion $ empire, spending a few bills on a couple of domain names is nothing if it stops even a handful of people from stumbling onto something that they think would harm their image. This is risk prevention/avoidance at a very low cost. That said, I completely agree with you.

It would be an interesting sort of crowd-sourced protest, if a lot of aggrieved people bought abusive domains and pointed them at a protest site existing pretty much specifically to collect them.

Domain registrars would make a mint off of such a protest...and it would be much more 'socially acceptable' than your typical DDoSing.

First registrar to announce splitting the proceeds of such actions with, say, Child's Play or the Red Cross could gain instant credibility with a large segment of the abusive-domain-buying public.

Further, it would sap the banks' resources as their PR people frantically attempt to mitigate the consequences of the protests. Now that we know they'll preemptively buy domains, too, it provides interesting opportunities for cybersquatting...

The really insidious strategy would be to register , and actually run your *sucks site, allowing user generated content, but with subtle manipulation and censorship, making it the number one destination for haters.

Truly. I'm betting that we can come up with more than a few doozies that BOA didn't register yet.

This may well end up in a variation on the Streisand Effect, with people going that extra mile to defeat BOA's attempt to stifle criticism after they well and thoroughly fucked people all across the US, Canada and Europe.

But I think this may be only the beginning for the largest transnational corporations shoring up their defenses ahead of the gr

Given the fact that every time their Liabilities exceed their Assets the Federal Reserve steps in and either buys up their assets at higher than market value or allows them to forgo the mark to market rules, I don't think this will be a problem for them. They essentially have an unlimited cash supply.

I'm proud to report that a friend of mine grabbed http://www.bankofamericasucks.org/ [bankofamericasucks.org] before BoA got to it. Currently it's just a redirect to an IT World article, but oh, the possibilities... especially since she works for a hosting company.

The nearly endless variety of insulting phrases that begin with [name] [verb] [...] makes it impractical to register more than a tiny proportion of them, and no matter how extensive, it's easy to think of alternatives.

[name]stealsyourmoney.com comes to mind in the context of BoA long before it would occur to me to register [name]sucks.com, much less [name]sucksass.com, [name]sucksthebigone.com, and -- in the spirit of Bill Hicks -- [name]suckssatansscalycock.com.

Exactly.. People aren't going to type in "bankofamericasucks.com" or "BOA-blows.com" into their URL. They're going to google for scam related information, making this domain buying completely useless. The exact URL is completely meaningless.

Go google "scientology" as an example. The 3rd result is "xenu.net" - a site who's sole purpose is to bring down the COS. Didn't need the word "scientology" anywhere in that URL.

Exactly.. People aren't going to type in "bankofamericasucks.com" or "BOA-blows.com" into their URL..

Ok... so I just realized that bankofamericasucks.com actually goes to a gripe site for the bank... so uh, I guess if people still type this in, they'll still go to a gripe site by typing in the most obvious URL anyway!! Makes this whole venture seem even more ridiculous!

There's astounding variety in dyslogistics; humanity's capacity to insult extends far beyond the simple "x sucks", "y blows", and often enters far more explicit territory. What makes them think that "sucks" and "blows" are the preferred verbal weapon of the domain-registering masses? If anything, this will only cause a rise in popularity of other insulting verbs.

I can imagine the board meeting where the idea was thrown out:
Corp Douche 1: "They're going to be angry when they learn about the kind of things we've done. They're probably going to write letters and e-mails and setup 'BoASucks.com'."
Corp Douche 2: "Well, we can ignore the mail. But websites? Oh my... the web! I hear there's a lot of people there and they say mean things about us! We can't let them do that!"
Corp Douche 3: "We can cut them off at the knees! Let's buy up all the 'sucks' and 'blows'

BOA is a bunch of angels compared to the rest of the financial community, they should probably be investing in security rather than PR...

There is a steady stream of "$PERSON$ loses job/house, kills family, self, occasionally neighbors and/or a cop or two" stories in the US. Given the number of dodgy forclosures BOA is believed to be involved in, including some cases where they didn't even own the loan, or where there was no loan, I could easily imagine some of their more visible people becoming part of dissatisfied customers' blood drenched exits.

The really high level guys probably already take precautions; but a bank the size of BOA probably has a lot of fat around the middle...

"There is a steady stream of "$PERSON$ loses job/house, kills family, self, occasionally neighbors and/or a cop or two" stories in the US."

The US is vast, has hundreds of millions of citizens, and with those odds there will ALWAYS be delectable, mediagenic tragedy to sell the public.

Revenge? Americans are sheep. Europeans too, though the example of Alfred Herrhausen shows how vulnerable even protected persons are to attack (and the method, if used with a modern EFP lens design encased in the usual pipe, is

This is like putting buckets over your flowers in advance of a hurricane...while living in New Orleans.

On the other hand it is really interesting they are scared enough about the Wikileaks release to take these fairly absurd measures. I wonder what public opinion of Wikileaks will be like if they expose some serious corruption in a major bank.

This seems to be pretty close to admitting that their senior execs have done things that would cause public outrage.
Seems like a smarter strategy would have been just to shut up completely about it until seeing what these leaks actually contain.
But, I suppose if you know beyond a doubt you will be proven guilty and held to account for something, you might as well prepare for it.

This seems to be pretty close to admitting that their senior execs have done things that would cause public outrage.
Seems like a smarter strategy would have been just to shut up completely about it until seeing what these leaks actually contain.
But, I suppose if you know beyond a doubt you will be proven guilty and held to account for something, you might as well prepare for it.

There is one prepatory step that will apparently never occur to them: admit they have done wrong, identify the people they have wronged, make it right by giving them full compensation, and document that they have done so.

There is one prepatory step that will apparently never occur to them: admit they have done wrong, identify the people they have wronged, make it right by giving them full compensation, and document that they have done so.

That's a sucker's bet. These people are PROFESSIONALS. They'll go with the tried-and-true method and round up some scapegoats, of course.

Listening to folks like the commenters here, it is clearly impossible for BofA to do this - everyone who owns a home has been impacted by Countrywide. If their home wasn't financed through Countrywide their neighbor's was and the drop in value of their neighbor's home tanked their home's value.

Roughly, according to National Association of Realtors, there are about 80 million single-family homes [answers.com] in the US today. The average value of all of these homes was around $170,000 and is now more like $100,000. Just having BofA pay every homeowner in the US $70,000 - all 80 million of them - would be 5.6 trillion dollars. If you blame banks for this mess, that is about what it would take. They don't have it.

One flaw with this is the banks may have participated, but the real problem is the bond rating agencies like Moody's. They are the ones that rated bonds backing subprime mortgages as AAA investment-grade bonds. Those bonds were then invested in by pension funds, municipalities and school districts. We haven't seen all of these bonds default yet, but they are going to - because the underlying mortgages are valueless and the rating agencies knew it. That pretty much means a lot of bankrupt pension funds, municipalities and school districts. Anyone that invested in AAA bonds exclusively is likely to get hit with this.

We haven't even seen the beginning of the collapse yet, but it is coming.

These are medieval hierarchies, so the protection of the individuals is automatically assumed to be identical to the protection of the company. They will allow untold damage to the organization to protect the leadership.

This was true in Paulson's financial bailout as well. No major CEO, board member or other major player was held accountable or lost their job, or has even been named in public as doing something wrong. For example, the ratings agencies, who clearly failed all their legal fiduciary requirements have been completely ignored.

So far the only big player who has faced any legal action is Earnst and Young, the accounting firm for Lehman Bros. They are accused of helping Lehman avoid disclosure of their weak financial condition by a trick known as "Repo 105". E&Y is being sued by Cuomo in New York State, not by the Feds. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/22/business/la-fi-ernst-young-20101222 [latimes.com]

The Feds have done almost nothing looking for illegal behavior among the financial elites. Their recent "big announcement" was about going after illegal insider information trading, mostly in the high tech sector. This is about as far from the financial meltdown as you can get and still be pretending that Wall St. is involved.

This is why the WikiLeaks dump of (most likely) BofA is so important. It will show massive wrong doing and that the Feds are consciously ignoring massive criminal activity on the part of the banks. It has the potential to change the public perception and possible change how these institutions are being regulated. One can always hope.

This is why trying to buy up domain names is so lame. This is going to be so meaningless if even part of the truth comes out.

And by the way, in the medieval hierarchy, anyone who reads this is a pesent.

The problem with this strategy is that as soon as you admit wrongdoing of any sort, there will be tons of people crawling out of the woodwork who were not actually wronged but who claim they were, just so they can get a wad of cash.

They don't have the money. Former hi-ups in the company have stated under oath that 60 to 80 percent of the mortgages they issued were not documented properly, and thus would not be able to be collected on. If one of these emails reveals that the bank had a plan to make money by passing these mortgages on to investors without revealing that they were bad. The entire bank's balance sheet will suddenly drop into the red.

right.... because if you aren't guilty, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE, right?

That's a saying about privacy. It's one thing to decide that you don't want people invading your privacy and that it's legitimate for non-criminals to feel that way -- that's understandable. It would be quite another thing to try to buy up every Web site that might conceivably be related to privacy -- that's unreasonable and not even feasible.

That's why this isn't a privacy issue and borrowing sayings from debates about privacy wo

For each $NAME in @EXECS$NAMEsucks.com$NAMEblows.com(repeat for org, net, etc)

Ok, whew! I think we got them all!

$NAMEsucksass.com$NAMEsucksshit.com(repeat for anything else to suck: goats, whatever, just stay on the legal side and don't make a claim that could be claimed in court to be slander/libel)$NAME_is_a_fuckwit.com

Honestly, I could keep going. People don't just type names in and add sucks and see what comes up, but if one of these execs is caught doing something illegal you can bet that appropriate

I have personally experienced the taking-down of sites and content by ISPs which were legally bullied (cease and desist orders) by large companies to make the site/content go away. It's possible that for every one site/piece of content that I've seen taken down outside of due process, short-circuiting the burden of proof, there may be many other sites where the ISP referred the matter to a legal department and determined that it was just corporate bullying, and took no action.

In my personal experience, when a big company threatens to take action against a smaller company, unless it's a high-profile case that the EFF is willing to tackle, the smaller company seems to fold and remove the site/content. It simply costs too much to battle it out in court, so the big guy often wins.

Does anyone have any experience with a smaller company telling a larger company to go suck eggs and successfully fighting a suit or threat to sue? Maybe I'm just cynical....

My old sysadmin told the MPAA to pound sand when they sent a blanket DMCA takedown notice to him for DeCSS, which at the time was not hosted on my site, along with a warning that even linking to search engine results for the file would result in a lawsuit (bizarrely, since I had never done this). After he did that, I followed up with their law firm directly, pointing them to my new page full of DeCSS links and telling them if they wanted to test their theory in court they could. I re-sent that on the one-ye

Whoever decided to do this doesn't understand the way language works. If an 'abusive' name doesn't exist or is unavailable people will just ascribe new meaning to an existing word or invent a new word that gets incorporated into a new name. Businesses often buy up domain names in the hope of a site being popular on its name alone. But the most popular websites often have made up names that didn't previously exist in everyday language. Bottom line -- it's the content that makes a site popular, not the name.

If they had the tiniest bit of courage and honour left, they'd just come clean with whatever the nasty bits are. That would also leave them in control of the story. But no, they'll probably put their PR people into overdrive to spin it once it's out, and until than hang on to the hope that it might not happen.

I'll be waiting for it. I doubt our collective opinion of banks could get any worse than it is, but let's hope that one or two of them come crashing down - as they should've instead of being bailed out

It appears that Bank of America has absolute confidence in its senior management. On one hand, I can sort of see why they would do this for all their executives; if they singled out anyone it'd be kind of an admission of guilt. But this way, they're sending the message that their entire upper management level is corrupt.

Back in 2000, the magazine 2600 tried to register VerizonSucks.com and found that it was already registered to Verizon, along with 100 variations. So they registered VerizonReallySucks.com and were doing fine until Verizon sued them. [slashdot.org]

There is no doubt that anyone wanting to create a boa-lostmyhouse.com address can be infinitely more creative than B of A can be in anticipating what that address might be.And ultimately it doesn't matter at all. You can post the same information at www.abc123-etc.com as you can on an address called boa-sucks.com.It's the information and dialogue that will be damaging (from the company's perspective), not the URL.If that's not obvious to them, why are they being entrusted with the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars?

No. It suggests that it is being done as a defensive strategy against a future publication. Nowhere does it say "major". At least not in the first sentence. It doesn't even imply that there is a known leak. It could be "just in case". But, sure, add some drama if you'd like.

Fix'd. It might be a coincidence, but considering Wikileaks say they have dirt on Bank of America, and that said bank took actions against Wikileaks, I'd be surprised if this weren't related to the leaks.

I mean if 100 people on every site this news is spammed to grabs a name they havn't already grabbed, all that will be left for the idiots wanting to slander/hit their name will be either geekspeek making them look less authoritative and diminishing the power of it or so ridiculously long that you need to take a second commercial spot out just to advertise the website.

Either way, it has the potential to increase the costs of making a site to slam them, and it has t

It's nice of Bank of America to provide an index to the coming revelations ahead of time. It should make the first pieces of dirt hit the headlines faster, since you know what to look for.

Also, I wonder if you could get another major organization to reveal their shady actions in this way simply by spreading a rumour that Wikileaks is onto them?

Finally, this is interesting from purely psychological point of view: It proves that the leadership of BoA understands that their actions would be considered evil by common people; thus it seems unlikely that they are psychopaths, as common theories hold, but rather simply evil.

I knew somebody who actually had their mortgage bank (a "small" shop) go out of business, but which sold all their loans off at a slight loss at the end before going bankrupt. The guy's file actually got lost in the office and the bankruptcy proceeded and completed without anyone finding it. The bills quit coming and nobody ever asked for money. He finally went to the courthouse and since the company had gone bankrupt without selling his loan, he owned the house free and clear.

There could be a lot of that going on soon. Foreclosure requires that the chain of title be unbroken. That is to say that there is a document, signed and notarized, for every time that the title changed hands. However county governments charge a fee for every time you transfer the title. The banks got around this by founding a "company" (MERS) which would buy the title, and hold on to it, and transfer the ownership of the title internally to whoever the latest owner of the loan was. (I put company in quotes

1. Open an escrow account and place your monthly mortgage payment, plus interest, into that account.2. File a small claims suit with your local county, against the mortgage company holding your mortgage. Make it for the monthly amount of the mortgage, plus interest. You are filing suit for them to provide a signed and notarized copy of the deed, as well as any copies of the bill of sale for ALL of the transactions they made with the property.3. Pay a process server to serve the holder the papers, or at least try.4. Hire a court recorder. Chances are good that the court will try to simply dump you once it becomes apparent what you're doing. The court reporter will keep them honest.5. Keep EXCELLENT records of every penny spent, as well as all transactions and communications with the process server and the court.6. Show up in court on the appointed day.

Now here's where it gets tricky.

The mortgage holder, if they can even be found, probably won't bother to send a lawyer for such a small sum. They'll simply ignore it, and you win by default. If they DO show up, they have to produce the paperwork. Again, chances are good they can't. If they produce a robo-signed copy, they'll be charged with forgery. The odds are stacked in your favor.

If the unlikely event happens that they can prove that the debt is valid, simply resume paying the mortgage and carry on as normal. That's what the escrow account is for.

If nobody shows up, take the money you won in the small claims suit and place THAT into the escrow account too. This shows good faith on your part.

7. File a new small-claims suit again for the next month. Follow steps 1-7, for six months or more. Six months is probably best.8. On the sixth court appearance, ask the court to nullify the debt. You can...

a. Show you fully intend to pay all debts if the paperwork is provided. (The escrow account again)b. Show you can cover all interest, penalties and fees if the paperwork is provided and you have to resume paying.c. Show that you can cover all costs of the court.d. Show that you paid the process server.e. Show you followed due process and due diligence.

And the mortgage holder has shown nothing but negligence and dereliction of their obligations.

The court will hand you the property with a clean deed.

BUT WAIT!!!!!

Remember that escrow account? DO NOT SPEND IT!!!

You're going to need that money to pay CAPITAL GAINS TAXES, because a new house will constitute a huge jump in your income, and that mortgage payment write-off is going bye-bye too.

You can tack this on as Step 8f: You can show ability to pay all federal, state and local taxes once the house is yours.

Bonus: If the mortgage holder sends your debt to collections while the court cases are pending, they're in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and can be slapped with a heavy fine on top of losing the mortgage.

IANAL (I'm currently on semester break from my last year of law school) but these types of websites are generally protected from many lawsuits due to their treatment as a form of free speech. Additionally under the CDA ( Communications Decency Act [wikipedia.org]) ISPs are generally not considered the publishers of content posted by their users which provides them some degree of immunity.

Check out this Wired article for some highlights of the legal issues related to a "sucks" / "gripe" site: Legal Tips For Your 'Sucks' Site [wired.com]. Although it was written in 2000 and so might be a little outdated, it's worth reading for some interesting info.

Two important points: (1) The site operator should avoid any commercial activity (at all) on the gripe site and; (2) The site operator should ensure that visitors would never think that the site is in any way associated with the entity that is the focus of the gripe site. While a properly designed gripe site is generally safe from losing a lawsuit it's definitely best to check with an attorney to make sure that you're doing everything properly before heading down a potentially expensive road.